Blogs

Can I Use Statistics to Design Indexes? (Dear SQL DBA Episode 18)

Can I Use Statistics to Design Indexes? (Dear SQL DBA Episode 18)

By Kendra Little on October 6, 2016 • 6 min read

Should you look at automatically created statistics on  your tables in SQL Server to help you design better indexes? Learn why in this 20 minute video, or subscribe to the Dear SQL DBA podcast.

No time to watch? Scroll on down, everything is written in article form below the video.

Here’s this week’s question:

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Last Minute Coupon Code for 2016 SQLPASS Summit

Last Minute Coupon Code for 2016 SQLPASS Summit

on October 5, 2016 • 1 min read

Category: indexing

I can’t wait to teach my full day course, SQL Server Index Formulas: Problems and Solutions in Seattle at the PASS Summit on Tuesday, October 25th. Woot! Less than 3 weeks away!

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Track Query Tuning Progress and History in Plan Explorer

Track Query Tuning Progress and History in Plan Explorer

on October 4, 2016 • 3 min read

As you tweak and test queries, it’s awfully useful to see how the performance has changed.

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Setting up Free Blocking Alerts and Deadlock Monitoring (Dear SQL DBA Episode 17)

Setting up Free Blocking Alerts and Deadlock Monitoring (Dear SQL DBA Episode 17)

What tools in SQL Server will notify you about blocking and help track the queries behind your toughest blocking and deadlocking problems?

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Measuring Query Duration: SSMS vs SQL Sentry Plan Explorer

Measuring Query Duration: SSMS vs SQL Sentry Plan Explorer

on September 27, 2016 • 5 min read

Every query tuner wants to explain exactly how much faster we made a query.

But sometimes SQL Server Management Studio adds noticeable overhead to the query duration. For relatively fast queries that return more than a few rows, just the overhead of displaying the results can skew your duration metric.

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Which is Worse: an Unused Index, or an Un-Indexed Foreign Key? (Dear SQL DBA Episode 16)

Which is Worse: an Unused Index, or an Un-Indexed Foreign Key? (Dear SQL DBA Episode 16)

on September 22, 2016 • 6 min read

Should you always index your foreign keys? What if you index them, and then the index never gets used?

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Index Tuning Decision Tree for SQL Server

Index Tuning Decision Tree for SQL Server

on September 20, 2016 • 3 min read

I recently mapped out my thought process for how I approach a new instance of SQL Server when it comes to index tuning.

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